The key takeaways and latest insights from BFCM 2023

As the dust settles on Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023, the outcomes of the retail extravaganza have left the industry buzzing. This year’s BFCM kept economic uncertainty, consumer spending expectations, and the ever-evolving landscape of B2C marketing top of mind, especially for marketing teams.

This begs the question: was Black Friday and Cyber Monday a triumph for marketers and retailers in 2023, and how did it stack up against the benchmarks set in the past?

Recently, Shopify unveiled staggering statistics around this year’s event, revealing that merchants under its umbrella collectively soared to $9.3 billion in sales over the weekend — a notable 24% surge compared to last year.

At Simon, we've delved into the data within our Customer Data Platform (CDP) to analyze the results of the BFCM rush. And, beyond the numbers, we spoke with our customers to glean firsthand insights into the nuances of this year's holiday fervor.

Here’s a look into how our customers prepared for BFCM, the metrics we saw on our platform, and some trends we noticed ‌from this year’s holiday craze.

Preparing for a busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend

With 20-50% of our client’s annual sales, projected revenues of ~$20.5B, and an increase of 380.2M events within Simon’s CDP occurring on BFCM last year, Simon’s engineering team prioritized providing real-time data for personalization, scalability, and optimal performance for our customers by:

• Rebalancing our client infrastructure
• Refreshing segments as quickly as they changed in the data warehouse so clients could respond immediately to changing customer preferences and market dynamics
• Enhancing our AI capabilities for improved actionable insights
• Providing security and support around the clock

Our team spent time with customers to better understand their send volumes, campaign strategies, and execution deliverables. We also worked closely with partners Attentive and Dynamic Yield to provide smooth integration and comprehensive support during BFCM.

“Huge shout-out to the Simon Data team for ensuring we were set up for success during the busiest time of the year. This was one of the smoothest Black Fridays we’ve ever had, and that is in part to you and all of your support!” - Josephine Tretheway, Senior Acquisition Associate, The Farmer’s Dog

BFCM 2023 was a record-breaking year for Simon Data customers

Overall, our customers had an incredibly successful Black Friday and Cyber Monday season, seeing strong year-over-year growth (nearly 45% in some cases) and conversion rates across all of their brands, even the smaller ones.

Despite sales beginning in early October, several companies saw a decline in purchases from mid-October through mid-November, signaling that shoppers were waiting longer (until “Cyber Week”) to make larger purchases compared to previous years.

However, the delay in purchases didn’t stop customers from responding at a record rate to promotional and event-triggered notifications, such as abandoned cart emails and product recommendations, which were particularly effective for our customers.

Nearly all of our customers will also continue to offer heavy-hitting discounts throughout the entire month of December — well beyond the traditional weekend-long BFCM event. It's likely this trend will continue into next year.

Analyzing the metrics of BFCM in Simon’s CDP

Our on-call product engineering and customer service teams had a relatively smooth BFCM, but the numbers from our CDP show just how busy the weekend was. From midnight Black Friday through 11:59 p.m. Cyber Monday, there were:

• 209,329,235 emails sent, a 144% increase from the average daily amount of emails sent
• 7,148,676 SMS sent, a 72.1% increase from the average daily amount
• 2,542,272 push notifications triggered, a significant decrease from the daily average, indicating that marketers prioritized email sends over push notifications during the weekend
• 2,789,130,173 total contacts synced, a 208% increase above the daily average

Many of our customers happily noted faster sync times in the Simon CDP and were incredibly appreciative of all the prep work our engineering team did to set accounts up for success.

When it comes to email deliverability for our customers, we couldn’t have asked for a smoother BFCM event. We delivered over 130 million messages at a delivery rate of 98.99% and a platform-wide open rate of 49.5%.

Simon Mail gives our clients unique access to their historic customer data, allowing them to target recipients more aggressively during this time, but in a way that minimizes their risk of deliverability damage.

One customer reported a record-breaking year, with their first sent email promotion generating the most revenue they’ve earned from a single email. Because of its success, the marketing team was able to decrease its spending on paid media and further optimize and extend its holiday campaign for the full week past Black Friday.

The continued success of BFCM and the impact of CDPs for marketing teams

Black Friday and Cyber Monday continue to be a successful yet challenging time of year for marketers, who must continue to deliver even more personalized customer experiences to stand out in a competitive market.

Thankfully, consumers have been responding positively to brand promotions and offers, and, with an extended sales season in the forecast, marketers will have the opportunity to end the year on a high note.

When we asked what our customer marketing teams relied on the most to deliver 1:1 personalized experiences during the busiest time of year, many cited the benefits of having access to real-time data to build 360 customer profiles and the ability to easily orchestrate campaigns all within one platform — emphasizing the power of using a CDP built on a data warehouse like Snowflake.

f you’d like to learn more about how Simon is leading the charge in enabling CRM marketers to access and deploy their data for personalization, request a demo today.